At present, there are many techniques for the electronic monitoring of the movement of stock, which can be used in many different commercial scenarios, such as a retail establishment, a factory environment, a warehouse environment, etc. These monitoring techniques include the scanning of any one of; a barcode printed on an item, an Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) tag affixed to the item, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag embedded in the item, and the like.
In particular, retail stores find benefit in maintaining an accurate, up-to-date inventory of items for sale in their establishments. Maintaining inventory counts manually is time consuming, costly, and prone to error. The need for performing these manual inventories can be reduced or eliminated through the use of an automated inventory tracking system. For example, an RFID tag can be placed on each item for which inventory tracking is desired. One or more fixed-position RFID readers can be distributed throughout the store to provide RF coverage of areas where inventory may be located. Each reader can poll for tags and send information about responding tags (e.g. Electronic Product Code, response count, signal strength) to a single central server via a wired or wireless Local Area Network. This server can store a record of the data received over time about each tag from each individual reader. The server can employ algorithms that process these records and periodically use the results to draw inferences about the locations of individual tagged items and whether or not they continue to be part of the store's salable inventory.
Even with these sophisticated techniques, there is still a problem in that RFID technology is not perfectly reliable as the tag reads are not guaranteed. For example, an RFID tag may not be read by any scanner for various reasons even if the tag is within the coverage area of one or more beams. Such reasons can include changes in RF conditions, the tag being in an RF shadow, or the scanners being subject to interference, for example. Further, tag presence and activity in some locations may not be covered by the scanner, i.e. a particular tag can not be observed. Yet another problem may arise where an RFID tag becomes detached from the item it was intended to track.
Accordingly, there is a need for a technique to mitigate the aforementioned issues. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing background.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.
The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.